Measuring the usage of individual research articles

Abstract

Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics (PIRUS) is a COUNTER-led project tasked with examining the viability of developing usage reports for individual articles by combining data gathered from publishers, aggregators and institutional repositories (IRs). The project studied current practices for storing and labelling individual articles in both publisher and repository environments, successfully tested a mechanism for automatically gathering usage data from IRs,and proposed a simple XML-based report for displaying article usage statistics that can, in principle, be implemented by any entity that hosts and provides online access to articles. PIRUS is optimistic that further development of the work so far undertaken could lead to a roll-out of a facility allowing publishers to track more use of their content than they currently do and to provide enhanced information to their authors, while IRs would gain a more demonstrable, quantitative measure of return on resources invested. Article © Richard Gedye.